Looking at how AI could help make society better in future

In 2042, I’m late getting back to Fermanagh. That’s because I’ve had to sweep streets right up until Christmas Day, having long ago lost my job as a university lecturer in a world where education has gone digital.

There’s no need for humans any more in professions such as teaching and medicine. But luckily there’s still a need for manual labour. Robots aren’t that fond of getting their hands dirty.

So I just about managed to save enough for the flight home – 20 minutes these days, from London to Belfast.

There, I hired a driverless car that brought me up the super-highway, for a bite to eat at The Valley Hotel.

That’s a lovely boutique hotel right in the middle of what used to be Fivemiletown.

Before that, Augher, Clogher and Brookeborough merged into one great urban sprawl, thanks to all the climate refugees.

But what I love about The Valley is that it’s one of the last places in these islands where you’ve got an actual living, breathing barman. Yes, honestly!

Though few people in England believe the story when I tell it, he’s there come rain or shine, working amongst the robots.

And he serves up a great synthetic fish – the closest thing you’ll get to salmon or tuna these days, with the world’s oceans so depleted. At least with that, there’s no chance of choking on a stray fishbone.

Wouldn’t want to end up in hospital, after all. Not with the price of healthcare these days.

Then again, it does cost money to keep the doctors and nurses fully charged – especially the robotic surgeons.

Okay – so back to 2024, where that vision of the world is still surreal.

Thankfully, robots haven’t replaced people as yet, and you can still get dinners made from natural produce in places like The Valley.

But how far away are we from some of the things that I imagined?

Definitely, climate change is happening, whether you believe that it’s natural or man-made.

This year there’s no snow in Canada’s coldest bits, whilst Australia and China burned like never before.

Meanwhile, there’s a slow creep of AI into every walk of life. Through my work this year, I’ve seen multiple demonstrations of that.

Everything’s changing at dramatic speed in five areas in particular – transportation, education, finance, entertainment and healthcare.

There are now software applications out there that can do things in minutes that would take hours of human labour.

Very soon, Britain’s entire slog of GCSE and A-Level exams might be marked in hours, not months. And that in many ways might be a good thing.

But the danger of all these advances is that people get squeezed out and technologies end up widening social divides instead of narrowing them.

After all, if computer programs such as CHAT GPT can do the company accounts, or even write news articles, what will we need humans for?

So maybe we should accelerate the headlong rush towards a society shaped by the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

We should welcome the robots serving us cocktails as we read an Impartial that AI has tailored to our specific needs, as Facebook does now with adverts.

I mean, surely at least AI might have some common sense? As we enter 2024, there are a few areas where software could do a smarter job.

I think the first is politics. CHAT GPT seems better able to see both sides of an argument than humans. Even some well-educated people seem unaware of their own subjectivity and bias.

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about emblems and symbolism. It’s astonishing that even in this day and age, many Unionist politicians appear ignorant of what the word ‘political’ means.

Every flag and anthem is political, whether it’s the Irish Tricolour, the French Tricolore or the British Union Jack.

The British monarchy is also political, not neutral. Similarly, symbols attached to that are political.

We shouldn’t require AI to understand something as simple as that. Then again, I suppose to a program like CHAT GPT, it’d be fairly easy to come up with a list of ways to create a shared society.

At the end of the day, everybody wants peace and prosperity, and to see services such as those of the South West Acute Hospital (SWAH) kept alive, so that nobody has to die prematurely or unnecessarily.

It shouldn’t take AI to tell us that there’s more to life than money. People’s lives and wellbeing should take priority over profit.

And all lives should be equal, whether you’re a ‘Sir’, ‘Doctor’, or whatever your pronoun may be.

But still, even in this day and age, to quote George Orwell: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

There’s nowhere that this is more obvious than the UK’s Honours List.

This year, several people with a Fermanagh connection have been granted awards similar to that which the legendary Jimmy Savile once held – Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE).

I doubt that if AI ran the world, there’d be such antiquated practices. To see why, I’d suggest doing a Google search and reading a real man’s words about what he thought of such things.

Look up the recently deceased poet Benjamin Zephaniah’s rejection of such an award as far back as 2003, long before there was as much public consciousness of race, racism and colonisation.

Things like the New Year’s Honours List suggest that, as a society, Britain hasn’t moved very far from attitudes that existed in the times of slavery.

Some animals are still seen as better than others, and the bosses are always better than the workers.

Let’s go back to something AI is slowly creeping into – healthcare.

Imagine a world where the ordinary nurses, doctors, cleaners etc were shown greater honour. And the ordinary people too – their patients.

Should it really take AI to teach us the things we need to do to make this a better world?

Or will it still be a mess, and maybe even a bigger mess, when the last human barman in town is calling “Last Orders”?